Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [163]
The fact that art is inherently an inaccurate representation of reality has long been a philosophical objection to the whole enterprise. In one of the most famous passages of The Republic, Plato contends that an ideal civilization would banish all artists, on the grounds that they are in the business of distorting the truth. As usual, Plato recruits Socrates as his speaker, and the latter begins his attack on art by asking us to think about (of all things) a bed. A bed, Socrates says, has three forms. The first form is divine. Since God created everything, he must have created the idea of a bed, and so the one truly perfect bed exists only in the mind of God. The second form is the kind you can buy at Ikea. That one is a corruption of the divine ideal, but it still earns a place in the republic, since even a philosopher-king needs somewhere to sleep. The third form, however, is a picture of a bed, and this is where Socrates draws the line. Here, the divine ideal is corrupted for no practical reason whatsoever: you can’t sleep on any of the mattresses on which lounge the innumerable nudes of the Uffizi. Pictures, Socrates argued, are nothing more than imitations of imitations, “thrice removed from the truth.” And the same goes for the literary arts. “All these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators,” Socrates opined. “They copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach.”
Socrates’ objection to these imitations wasn’t that, like pictures of furniture, they are useless. It was that they are worse than useless. Like false fires and superior mirages, art misleads us by presenting representation as reality. He asks: with what part of ourselves do we appreciate art? With our senses, of course—and we already know exactly how trustworthy those are. Not only do “[artistic] creations have an inferior degree of truth,” Socrates argues, they are “concerned with an inferior part of the soul.” For him, that seals the deal: “I have said that painting or drawing, and imitation in general…are far removed from truth, and [are] the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason, and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit [the artist] into a well-ordered State.”
Plato’s gripe with artists has sent many undergraduates storming out of their introductory philosophy classes in disgust. And with reason: most of us don’t care to imagine life without literature and art, and we don’t have good associations with the kind of societies that seek to censure, silence, or exile their artists. But the trouble here is not Plato’s observation that art is a kind of error. He was right about that. The trouble is that he subscribes to the pessimistic model of wrongness. Having discerned the connection between representation and error, it follows, for him, that art is a mark of our distance from God, the product of an inferior part of our souls, a discredit to our reason, and something we should seek to eliminate. His desire to banish art is part of a long and often sinister tradition (which we glimpsed earlier) of trying to create ideal societies through eradicating error in all its forms.
All of those disgruntled undergraduates, meanwhile, are motivated in part—whether they know it or not—by the optimistic model of wrongness. They recognize, as most of us do, not just the legitimacy but also the potential beauty and power of individual, skewed, inaccurate representations of reality. In this model, the link between error and art is not an indictment of art but a defense of error. Cut off from the absolute essence of things—that ideal form that Plato felt existed only in the mind of God—our separate, subjective